Introduction: Welcome to Five & Thrive: a weekly podcast highlighting the Southeast’s most interesting news, entrepreneurs, and information of the week, all under 5 minutes. 

My name is Jon Birdsong and I’m with Atlanta Ventures. 

Announcement of the Week: Neighborhood Studios was recently launched by Dave Payne - Former Managing Director at TechStars and Co-founder of ScoutMob. Neighborhood Studios is a hyper-local venture studio with the thesis that starting hyper-local is the best way to build something users love and then expand it nation and world wide. If you listened to last week’s Youtube Video of the Week with Brian Chesky of AirBnB and how earning a 100 users that love your product is the best approach, well it just validates it’s a damn good thesis. Dave has built a passionate and very talented team around him including Tapan Patel to validate ideas, execute on customer discovery, and then recruit a CEO to run the business. Their first company has already been spawned called Homegrown. Homegrown is the best way to finance your next brick & mortar location. The best SMB businesses face limited access to growth capital. Homegrown creates opportunities between local wealthy investors and best-in-class businesses that are ready to expand. Keep an eye on Neighborhood Studios and the idea generation occurring – oh and they are also looking for a CEO.     

Community of the Week: This week I had a wonderful meeting with CodePath CEO Michael Ellison who is expanding their reach to Atlanta. CodePath is reprogramming higher education to create the most diverse generation of engineers, CTOs, and founders. There are over 20,000 students and alumni from 500 colleges now working at 2,000 companies that have learned how to build through CodePath. CodePath is supported by Google, JP Morgan, Andreessen Horowitz, and several other prominent companies. Whether you’re a CS student today or moonlighting at night, joining CodePath provides the programming, mentorship, and community to accelerate your career and learning.   

New Meetup of the Week: This week, Atlanta Ventures launched Atlanta AI Meetup. Artificial Intelligence is moving quickly. Applications are built every day that will lead to thousands of use cases in our work, art, science, life, and leisure. This Meetup group is for the curious ones who want to explore the rabbit hole of applications and deciphering what is valuable and what is not and the larger impact on society as a whole. The pace of advancement is so rapid this will be a great force function for those looking to learn the most important and latest innovations in the AI space. Whether you are an engineer on the OpenAI team or taking your first prompt, this MeetUp is for you. At our events, we'll be experimenting with the most interesting applications and discussing ways this changes society through a respectful, supportive, and engaging environment. We’re ironing out the date of the first meeting but join the Atlanta AI Meetup to get notified of the date which we’ll cement soon. 

Product of the Week: The product of the week is led by founder and CEO, Astrid Androsch called AlpStoriesTech out of Atlanta. They provide mass-customization at scale to the beauty, nutrition and health industry while making the world cleaner. They focus on influencers and entrepreneurs between 1M-20M followers who want to sell their own product but don’t want to go through the pain of finding a manufacturer, sourcing the material, navigating packaging and design. AlpStoriesTech handles all of it, including the customization. How do they do it? As an influencer and entrepreneur you have 60 ingredients to create your customized product and they take care of the rest with their end-to-end supply chain technology solution with robotic on-demand manufacturing. If you want to create your own beauty product, AlpStoriesTech is one of the best avenues to design, manufacture, and build without the headaches and hassle with zero waste.

Level Up with Coaching: Atlanta entrepreneur and co-founder of Terminus, Eric Spett is ramping up his coaching services. If you’re an entrepreneur looking to accelerate value creation while minimizing pain, Eric is your coach. Having an objective sounding board removed from the inner circle of a business (co-founders, employees, investors, and Board members) is a huge asset while building in the trenches. If you’re interested, reach out to Eric Spett on LinkedIn.

Annnnnnnd that’s 5 minutes! 

Announcement of the Week: Neighborhood Studios and Homegrown

Community of the Week: CodePath

New MeetUp of the Week: Atlanta AI Meetup

Product of the Week: MyAlpStory

Level Up with Coaching: Eric Spett

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